Analysis of the new coup d´Etat attempts in Venezuela

Interview with William Gudiño of Red de Comuner@s

Recent violent street actions, aiming to destabilize the Venezuelan government, indicate paramilitary preparation inspired by the actions of illegal groups in Colombia, said William Guidiño, member of Red de Comuner@s of Venezuela and Head of the National Land Institute (INTI) in an interview with Real World Radio.

Leopoldo López, former Mayor of Chacao municipality, who called for people “to take the streets until the government is out” will be arrested on Tuesday 18. He has been a fugitive since February 12.

Holder of a broad record that can be dated back to the attacks against the Cuban Embassy during the coup d´etat of 2002 against then president Hugo Chavez, Lopez has the explicit support of the US State Department.

As denounced in a national broadcast by President Nicolas Maduro –elected in April 2013, less than a month after Chavez´s death- Alex Lee, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs read a message to the Venezuelan representative to the Organization of American States, Roy Chaderton Ramirez, addressed to the national government demanding Lopez’s arrest warrant be dropped since “it could cause many negative consequences with international effects”.

Lopez was the main instigator of the street violence in Caracas that destroyed part of the National General Attorney´s Office building and resulted in the deaths of three people.

Maduro considered the US threats as meddling and said that he will appeal to all international spaces Venezuela is part of to denounce them. In addition, he expelled three officers of the US Consulate and Embassy in Caracas after finding them responsible for conspiracy meetings with university students.

Caracas, capital city of the country, has been declared a peace zone, and Lopez’s call for action on Tuesday was not authorized. Pacification is a fundamental concept in the counter-campaign of the Bolivarian forces. However, Gudiño said in the interview with Real World Radio that the violence is taking place in middle-class neighborhoods and that the peripheral municipalities are ready, with a strong street presence, to stop the new coup d´Etat attempts.

In this way, Gudiño said that the confrontation with the paramilitary training sectors reach “students and middle class groups as cannon fodder. For their coup attempts, students are not fundamental, but the forces with military preparation who act in an orderly way”, such as the case of the destruction of Caracas´ subway line.

The violent actions seem planned and aimed to destroy emblematic institutional or buildings that draw tourists, such as the Alba Caracas Hotel or the Teresa Carreño Theater, and the people responsible have been identified and denounced.
Some media disclosed secret recordings of conversations between Venezuelan right-wing politicians, where information about these attacks was being discussed a few days before them taking place.

Gudiño said that contrary to the destabilization processes of 2002, there aren´t risks of the military force unity being weakened and that the relative weight of society sectors, like the ones who demonstrated back then by banging pots and pans in public places, today is minimized as a result of the violent acts.

Permanent denunciation and mobilizations to maintain territorial control are the methods Red de Comuner@s is implementing in these critical days, he explained.
In his analysis of the reason why the destabilizing campaign chose these dates,
Gudiño is suspicious of the existence of analyses that indicate a possible power gap after almost a year of Hugo Chavez death. In addition, the government obtained an important victory at municipal level last December, which opens a period of a year and a half without elections. This could have caused certain despair by the opposition, which encouraged them to pursue these coup attempts, said Gudiño.

The violent actions were supported by a real army of users of social networks such as Twitter, who used false images aiming to show the human rights violations by the police against the counter-revolutionary demonstrators.

Such is the case of the image attached to this article that corresponds to a Basque prisoner tortured in a Spanish jail, which was used by Twitter users as an emblem of the supposed attacks committed by the Venezuelan official forces.